Pancreatic cancer is responsible for nearly 40,000 deaths in the U.S. annually, with a dismal 5-year survival rate below 7%. The poor therapeutic outcomes reflect a paucity of new approaches targeting the genomic underpinnings ...

High-resolution ex vivo magnetic resonance microscopy (MRM) can be used to delineate prominent architectonic features in the human brain, but increased contrast is required to visualize more subtle distinctions. The goal ...

Metastasis, the spread and growth of tumor cells from the primary site to distant organs, is arguably the most devastating and deadly attribute of cancer, and is ultimately responsible for 90% of cancer-related deaths. ...

Health communications use factual information or/and personal testimonials to inform and influence individual decisions that enhance health. Increasingly, Web and other computer-based systems are being used to communicate ...

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries affect over 200,000 Americans yearly, and many occur in young athletes. Current treatment options include tendon autografts and cadaveric allografts. However, these approaches often ...

Understanding intensity coding and auditory learning are basic concerns of research on the auditory central pathway. There is no unifying model of intensity coding but several mechanisms have been proposed to play a role. ...

Layer-by-layer assembly has become a quintessential tool for the creation of versatile, dynamic nanostructured materials able to dictate cellular behavior through exquisite surface functionality and delivery of bioactive ...

Traditional representations of speech are derived from short-time segments of the signal and result in time-frequency distributions of energy such as the short-time Fourier transform and spectrogram. Speech-signal models ...

Cochlear implants are prosthetic devices that seek to restore hearing in profoundly deaf patients by electrically stimulating the auditory-nerve (AN). With current implants, the representation of the sound waveform in ...

The human microbiota consists of 100 trillion microbial cells that naturally inhabit the body and harbors a rich reservoir of genetic elements collectively called the microbiome. Efforts based on metagenomic sequencing of ...

Transitive inference (TI) refers to inferences on relations between items based on other known relations of those items. Using a paradigm where participants first learn a series of four overlapping pairs that constitute ...

Pharmaceutical productivity, as measured by annual output of new molecular entities and new therapeutic biologics, has fallen significantly since reaching a peak in 1996. According to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ...

Efforts to sequence cancer genomes have begun to uncover comprehensive lists of genes altered in cancer. Unfortunately, the number and complexity of identified alterations has made dissecting the underlying biology of ...

In addition to cancer cells, solid tumors consist of a variety of cell types and tissues defining a complex microenvironment that influences disease progression and response to therapy. To fully characterize and probe the ...

This thesis asks one basic question: how do "vertical" disease- or intervention-focused global health programs impact the underlying health systems of the nations they serve? Vertical programs-health aid focused on a ...